Jill Tate

Jill Tate (b. 1983, UK) is a visual artist based in Newcastle upon Tyne. She gained a 1st Class BA (Hons) in Contemporary Photographic Practice from Northumbria University in 2005. After establishing herself as a professional architectural photographer, she shifted from making mostly photographic artwork to focus on painting. Working primarily in oils, Jill makes representational paintings of simplified domestic spaces, in order to physicalise abstract concepts that relate to perception and the meaning of home. Jill’s paintings are held in private collections and have been exhibited throughout the UK.

“From the architecture we inhabit to the building blocks of reality, my work surveys the visible and invisible structures that shape our shared and personal space.

I often return to the theme of home, regarding it as both a physical and psychological structure permeating all levels of experience. The domestic scenes portrayed in my paintings exist to embody the abstract concepts at their root.

The place we call home can feel like a sanctuary or a prison, whether it is made of bricks or brain cells. The tension and oscillation between opposites such as comfort and fear or peace and violence, plays out quietly in the sparsely furnished environments that I create.

Each painting begins as a scale model, which I then light and photograph to produce reference images. I use natural earth colours to evoke the literal and metaphysical ground from which everything arises and returns. Light plays a crucial role in my work, illuminating form and offering hope through the darkness. The decision to use a monochromatic colour palette is based on the premise that all things are fundamentally made of the same stuff: energy temporarily organised and experienced as solid matter, akin to a scene emerging from an arrangement of paint.”